“Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”
Josh Hokit, at the White House lawn after winning his fight, June 14.
Desecration has purpose and effect. It is political speech. It is a message:
There is nothing sacred about the U.S. Not its places, institutions, or norms. We have power and will use it however we want, so, fuck you.
The cage fight took place on the White House lawn. Award ceremonies took place at the Lincoln Memorial. The event was a commercial event with paid ticketing, advertisements, and sponsors. People who accuse Trump of being thoughtless and impulsive are not wrong. But he has superb instincts about political messaging. The event was a political message of Trump marking his territory like a dog urinating on a wall, fresher and higher than the previous dog, or a graffiti-tagger putting something new and bigger on top of another tag.
The USA has a civic religion. The country was not installed and consecrated by a pope who crowned a country's leader. The Constitution begins with "We the People." We formed it. We made it special. We have substituted civic institutions, places, and symbols for religious ones. Children stand to say the "Pledge of Allegiance." We stand for the National Anthem, and when someone kneels for it, even respectfully, a great many people object. We debate from time to time whether to limit the First Amendment's free speech clause to say that burning the U.S. flag is not permitted speech.
I have been to the Lincoln Memorial. It feels like a temple. Imposing. Silent. Words engraved on the wall stating our purpose as a country.
Josh Hokit was celebrating his victory. With what, exactly, with his comment about Michelle Obama? He was celebrating the power of transgression. He could be racist and misogynist and offensive. He could be obscene, in the Greek drama sense. He could put before the people that which should be off-screen, i.e. obscene.
I wrote yesterday of my great disappointment with Republicans, people who had happily voted for Ronald Reagan, who said he never took off his suit jacket in the Oval Office out of respect for it, and John McCain, whose sense of military honor kept him tortured in a North Vietnamese prison for extra years rather than be released out of order of men held longer. Republicans voters have understood honor and personal character in the past.
Barack Obama's election seemed to have changed something in Republicans. Trump's accusation that Obama was illegitimate from the beginning found political traction within Republican voters. Obama's education and credentials were fine; he had been a state senator then a U.S. senator. But he is black -- half black, a half-breed -- and therefore uncomfortably foreign, an outsider. His wife became part of that illegitimacy. She spoke about wholesome food and healthy exercise, a good anodyne concern. They were married, scandal-free, and had two children. But there needed to be illegitimacy somehow. The right-wing trope emerged. Michelle Obama was in fact a man, making her a fraud and Barack Obama gay. The story has persisted for a decade, advocated by Elon Musk's father, by right wing trolls, by social media commenters. It is untrue, physically impossible, but persistent.
The accusation created an idea, or cemented an idea out there in the zeitgeist that the U.S. government is a fraud. That our institutions are a fraud. That playing by the rules is a sucker's game. That polite is for sissies. That norms are to be broken because actions are legitimized by the power to take them.
Donald Trump staged a cage fight award ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial to de-sanctify the Lincoln space and what it represents. Josh Hokit's comment was not out of place. It was part of the process of vandalizing.
Perhaps, a decade from now, when Trump is gone, Republican voters and officeholders will have swept up the mess and remember themselves as never, ever having been part of the Trump movement. MAGA, they will say, was about making America great, not vandalizing it. They will pretend to forget, and then they won't need to pretend. They will have re-written their memories.
9 comments:
Trump had 6 bankruptcies, so it’s to be expected that the economy would do poorly, not good for working class people. Turns out getting rid of illegal aliens is also bad for the economy, especially for farmers. Who could have imagined that? We can pretend we weren’t defeated in Iran, but it won’t change the reality that it was a disaster. Gee, it’s pretty easy to write negative comments on how things are going. I wonder if Trump had anything to do with that?
Trump claimed without any evidence that President Obama was born in Africa, and that was the least of his racist remarks. Now one of his invitees to the White House calls Michelle a man, and Trump smirks. Republican voters have said they love Trump because he says what they think. They should be ashamed, but they have no shame.
Liberal elites went way too woke in the 2010s, and (of course) this has produced a populist backlash that is going way too far in the other direction.
The moral? Moderation is a virtue.
MT, ah the villains and heroes are switching roles as influencers are they? So what’s your favorite pejorative for the opposite of “Liberal Elite” ?
Moderately obscene was Biden’s 2023 Pride celebration on the South Lawn, wherein three trans women dropped their tops to display their breasts. Perhaps the approximate equal opposite of the vulgar UFC display?
These may be cross-partisan concerns as it is. How many of the arson-inclined New York Knicks rioters are NOT Democrats, we might ask?
Liberal elites elected a Black president in 2012, and (of course) this has produced a racist backlash. It's past time for racism to slither back under its rock.
Posted on behalf of Chip OHare, a college classmae:
Peter, Another superb post. Many thanks for your ability to post “every freakin’ day!” One would think that your observations along with HCR and others would build outrage to the point where demonstrations would be loud, well reported, and reflect the American population at large. And yet it is not happening. And when demonstrations do occur, the demonstrators are old and gray, not young and pissed. How can this be? Trump has succeeded in making things so noisy, with daily misinformation, that truth can no longer be determined by many Americans who just want to live everyday lives knowing that their government is functioning for their benefit. Sadly, the confidence in American governmental management has been undermined not just by Trump, but by most high office holders, as we see most politicians feeding at the trough, some quietly, like senators who arrive in DC with little money but become multi-millionaires, and others loudly, like Trump and his grifting administration. The Biden family was not immune to these charges either, as his opportunity for a dignified and self-sacrificing moment was blown by his decision to run again at 80. I’m afraid It’s systemic, and it’s rotten. The midterms will hopefully result in a Democratic house and senate, which would blunt the craziness at least, but until we see a leader who comes from the tradition of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, who revers the will of the people more than power and money, I don’t see things changing. Can someone come forward to fit this description? And is it too late to fix our malaise, given our staggering national debt and geopolitical threats? My wife and I are continuing to contribute to candidates in whom we have hope. But we have become convinced that it will take a seismic political/economic event to press a rest button that results in a change of political direction in the country. We pray that it’s not war or a major depression, but we fear that something is coming, and our present situation will not end well.
@JohnC: There is no “opposite“ of the liberal elites. Things on the right breakdown into different categories.
Who am I opposed to on the right? Neo-Nazis. Isolationists. The anti-gay component. The anti-vax component (the left also has a different one of those that I am also opposed to).
Racism was not the only component of opposition to Obama. Some of us thought the JCPOA was unacceptably weak; this had nothing to do with race. Some of us were offended by the “apology tour” that Obama did at the beginning of his first term. Again, something that had nothing to do with race. Some of us disliked that his pastor for 20 years apparently hated America. Nothing to do with race there either.
When all you have as a hammer labeled racism, everything looks like a racist nail.
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